The Bible teaches unambiguously that there are many gods.

I’m not making some kind of tenuous linguistic argument here based on dubious translations of obscure terms. It is blatant. There are a number of verses in the Bible in which polytheistic gods are referred to using precisely the same set of Hebrew terms that are used to refer to the God of Israel (el, אל, plural elim, אילם; and eloha, אלוה, plural elohim, אלהים).

So, the Bible teaches in various places that there are many gods.

Of course, it also teaches in other places that there is only one god.

The texts referring to multiple gods are the remnants of ancient Middle-Eastern polytheism. The monotheistic god of the Abrahamic religions – God with a capital G – seems to have developed from two earlier polytheistic deities who were worshipped in the Levantine region, Yahweh and El.

The Israelites were originally polytheists, like their neighbours, and they came to monotheism through the intermediate stage of monolatry: the belief that many gods exist, but only one should be worshipped because he has entered into a special and exclusive covenant with Israel.

Precisely when monotheism became established in ancient Israel is a debated point. It is sometimes said that we don’t find explicit denials of the existence of other gods until the sixth century BCE. References to plural gods and a divine council continue to appear in Jewish literature in the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE).

So why does no-one talk about this – or at least no-one outside specialised circles of religious scholarship?

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In some cases, the polytheism of the biblical text has been obscured or hidden from non-Hebrew speakers by translators. Take the opening of Psalm 29:

Give to Yahweh, sons of gods [bene elim],

give to Yahweh glory and strength.

The King James Version (KJV) turns the “sons of gods” into the “mighty”. Who these “mighty” are is not explained. The Catholic Vulgate version has a completely different interpretation of the phrase: “Bring to the Lord sons of rams” (Adferte Domino filios arietum).

As it happens, the Vulgate uses the “mighty” tactic at Exodus 15.11. This verse reads:

Who is like you among the gods [elim], Yahweh?

In this case, the KJV bites the bullet and writes “among the gods”, but the Vulgate goes with “among the mighty” (in fortibus).

Another instance of obfuscation by translators may be found at Job 1.6, which depicts God holding court in the divine council, just as a human king would sit with his counsellors. This was a familiar image from ancient Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean religion:

And one day the sons of gods [bene ha-elohim] came to present themselves before Yahweh, and the Satan also came among them.

In Hebrew, the formula ‘sons of Xs’ appears to have meant simply ‘Xs’, so we can interpret the ‘sons of gods’ as being simply gods. But the word elohim can also be translated as singular, and that is what the King James Version does:

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

This, of course, still leaves the question of who the ‘sons’ are. They sound like polytheistic deities, akin to the sons of Zeus. The ancient Greek Septuagint translation dealt with this difficulty by rendering the phrase as “the angels of God”. In orthodox Abrahamic theology, angels are spiritual beings of an altogether lower order than God: they are his ‘sons’ only in the same metaphorical sense that humans can be called children of God. The Septuagint’s rendition is a possible interpretation of the Hebrew; but it crosses the line from translation into theology.

The “angels of God” also make an appearance in the Septuagint version of this passage, at Deuteronomy 32.8-9:

When the Most High [elyon] divided the inheritance of the nations,

when he divided the sons of Adam,

he set the boundaries of the peoples

in accordance with the number of the angels of God;

the portion of Yahweh was his people,

Jacob was his share of the inheritance.

The standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament (the Masoretic Text) renders the phrase in question as “sons of Israel” (bene Yisrael), presumably meaning the Israelite people. Something odd is going on here. The passage seems to be saying that the Most High God divided the nations up. But there is no reason why the Most High God would have divided up the nations in a way that corresponded with the number of Israelites. Nor does bringing angels into the passage make it clearer, since Yahweh, who is mentioned immediately after the phrase, was not an angel. The suspicion is that the original phrase must have been “sons of God”. What is going on here is that the Most High God is dividing up the nations, one for each of his divine children: and the Israelites (the descendants of Jacob) are the nation whom he assigns to the god Yahweh.

As a final example of polytheism being obscured by translation, there is this passage at Habakkuk 3.3-5:

God came from Teman,

the Holy One from Mount Paran….

Before him went Deber,

and Resheph followed his steps.

We know from evidence outside the Bible that Resheph was a Semitic god. Deber, although less well-attested, also seems to have been a god or spirit. What we have here is the God of Israel accompanied by two (lesser?) divinities. But most English translations render the Hebrew terms as abstract nouns, along the lines of “plague” and “pestilence”. The Vulgate took a slightly different approach, rendering Deber and Resheph respectively as “death” (mors) and “the devil” (diabolus). This had some influence on later Catholic translations, notably the Douay-Rheims.

So much for the shenanigans of translators. In other instances, translations make no attempt to disguise polytheistic phrases.

In the KJV we find these verses:

Numbers 33.4: ….upon their gods also the LORD executed judgments.

Psalm 86.8: Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord….

Psalm 95.3: For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

Psalm 135.5: For I know that the LORD is great, and that our Lord is above all gods.

Likewise, the Septuagint and the Vulgate render each of these phrases correctly.

It is also worth mentioning the following passage at Judges 11.23-24, in which the Israelite leader Jephthah expresses a thoroughly polytheistic view of the world in a message to the neighbouring Amorites:

Now Yahweh, the god of Israel, has driven away the Amorites from the path of his people Israel. Will you now possess the land? Do you not possess what your god [elohe] Chemosh gives you to possess? Then we will possess everything that Yahweh our god [elohe] takes possession of for us.

There is not much ambiguity here.

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Why have so few people heard of all this?

In part, because most people don’t read much of the Bible, even if they are devout and observant Christians or Jews. Scriptures are mediated by traditions of theology and preaching. People rely on these mediating mechanisms: the weekly sermon from the priest or rabbi, devotional books and talks. If they do come across something odd, they may not even notice it – people often don’t notice odd things in texts that they are reading, especially if the text is a familiar one. If they do happen to notice it, their tradition of interpretation will give them resources with which to resolve the oddness.

References to multiple gods are not impossible to interpret in a way consistent with monotheistic doctrine. They can be explained as references to lesser spiritual beings: angels or demons. Or they can be taken to mean ‘alleged gods who don’t really exist’. Or they can be interpreted as referring to human kings. All of these strategies have been applied to the polytheistic verses in the Bible. But such explanations – whether one finds them plausible or implausible – are external to the verses themselves. They are essentially exercises in theology, not in reading the scriptural text.

These are not criticisms, by the way. I am not suggesting that religious believers are somehow deficient, or that they are given to doing anything that people in general don’t do. People who aren’t scholars shouldn’t have to engage in detailed analysis of the primary texts of their religion. And we all access texts through traditions of interpretation which emphasise certain elements and explain away parts that seem to pose problems. It could hardly be otherwise. An American citizen will interpret the US constitution through what they learnt in their civics lessons and through the commentary that they have encountered in the media and in their chosen political subculture. The same thing can be said of all kinds of cultural products. It is difficult to set aside familiar interpretative lenses. A reader who ploughs through Pride and Prejudice will struggle not to be haunted by the ghosts of Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, not to mention Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen.

There is nothing that we can do about this except be conscious of it. If you choose a venerable old text to admire – or to live your life by – just be aware that you’re probably also choosing a tradition of interpretation which is external to the text itself. That tradition is not necessarily wrong. But it would be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that it’s there.